The Solitary Pinsapo

It is the only tree in sight, which is the entire point of it. The Solitary Pinsapo grows on a crag of bare rock near the Puerto del Pinsapo in a stretch of mountain with no woodland at all, so it reads at a distance as a single dark shape on grey stone. It is 17 metres tall and 3.50 metres round at chest height, and the base measures double that, 7 metres, because the trunk has spread sideways to get over and around the rocks it emerged on, some of which it is slowly swallowing. The register calls it a silent witness to the distribution the species once had, which is the honest way to put it: pinsapo forest covered far more of these mountains before the climate dried and people cut and grazed the rest, and an isolated fir on a bare crag is what is left of a wood. The only plants near it are what those soils allow, terebinth, kermes oak and hawthorn. The land is private and there is no path to the foot of it, so this is a tree to look at from the pass rather than to stand under.